All your letters that are fit to print. And two extra
Diesel do nicely
April 2019 was a great issue. I’m a big BMW fan and I was very interested in your 850i bit in the Our Cars section. At one point Ben Miller says that no truly great driver’s car has ever run on diesel. This is true when you talk about sports cars. But for fast saloons, I beg to differ. I am the owner of an F30 BMW 335d and it’s much nicer to drive than the equivalent 340i. It has massive amounts of torque, effortless grunt and respectable economy. I believe the same applies for many other models, especially in the past decade.
I understand that diesel is on its way out and I will probably change mine soon. But through the years we saw many great cars run on it. Maybe you could do a list of the greatest diesel non-SUV cars in one of your future issues.
Tasos Charalambous
If only
nd ‘Electric 911!’ is a great attentiongrabbing headline on your July cover, but perhaps the less attentiongrabbing truth is that the Porsche Taycan is an Electric Panamera (no exclamation mark). While there have been countless 911 variants, I don’t recall a four-door one.
Richard Keefe
It’s happening
In his July column Gavin Green looks at the role of the driver in an increasingly tech-led industry. This misses why Lyft, Uber and friends are investing billions in driverless vehicles. Transport was devised to move people and goods around, not to provide driver entertainment. The future of mainstream transport will be shared, cost ecient, congestion busting public services.
I’ll just have to suck it up and, as an endangered species, evolve to find new niches to play in.
Nick Bromley
Screen if you want to go faster
I read Gavin Green’s column on technology and driving distraction in the July issue with a sense of doom. Obviously, like all keen drivers I don’t want to be taken from place to place ⊲
by a robot car, but the real issue is how the car makers are pushing us to accept ever more screen-driven systems.
I recently took delivery of a Volvo XC60 T5 (excellent car, smooth, quiet, comfortable and quite brisk), having part-exchanged a BMW 4-series Gran Coupe (great car, awful dealer). While I’m mostly very happy with the XC60 the screen-controlled functions are a huge distraction, and everything is screen-controlled. It’s much too complicated to use when driving.
In the BMW, the screen was just a screen and everything was controlled via the iDrive. Now I spend a lot of time trying to figure out where in the menus I can find how to shut off radio trac reports, get music from my phone to play through the speakers, stop the steering wheel pulling left or right on a lane change or adjust the air-con. It’s distracting, irritating and much more complex than it needs to be. This is not progress.
David Imrie
Sticking point
I borrowed a Volvo XC90 recently and, while stuck in a trac jam, started scrolling through the many screens to see just what techy capability it had. The connectivity, adaptability and future-proofing seem to be immense, and very impressive. And then I realised the key point of all this: I was stuck in a trac jam. We’re still not really dealing with the important things, are we? Alan Cooper
Join the queue
Recently, while waiting to fill up my internal combustion-powered car in a petrol station, I started wondering what electricity stations would be like once the impending transformation really gets going.
Everyone in front of me was taking around four minutes to fill up while a handful of cars waited patiently in line behind them. I started thinking about how the numbers will work when these drivers are in electric cars that want a 40-minute charge. Where are we going to find the space to accommodate all
nd these car parks and charging points, and what will the carbon footprint be of the huge amount of infrastructure this will require?
Although I’m a petrolhead, I realise the future is not petrol. But it’s not batteries either, not as we know them. The risk here, the big risk, is that the world is investing huge amounts of money into another MiniDisc or Betamax video recorder, except that the cost – both financial and environmental – is going to be so much greater.
Andi Rusyn
Where have all the real cars gone?
I have had the privilege of owning many great ‘analogue’ cars – TVR Chimaera, Porsche 911 (993), Boxsters – as daily drivers, and am now looking to swap my Audi S5 cabriolet for something more practical (for family use) but still one that gives driving pleasure. But we are in an absolute minefield of digital cars gone mad!
Did the major prestige car companies just let R&D teams go wild on car interiors and high tech? So many seem like iPhone extensions. What’s with all these touchscreens now? Surely dangerous on the move.
I will be struggling to use more than 30 per cent of the tech of most of my choices, and yet I am paying crazy sums.
The closest to what I want is an Alfa Giulia; I still get cool dials and it drives ‘like they used to’. Or maybe the combination of a used Skoda Yeti 4x4 diesel as a daily driver and an old six-cylinder Boxster S for analogue weekends would do the trick.
Tony Hjiantoniou
Too much fun I have been a regular reader of CAR for years and wonder whether you have some contractual obligation to have a feature about Porsche in virtually every issue. They make excellent cars, but one can have too much of a good thing.
I like the new style but miss the ‘quirky’ vehicles on the inside back page. Edward Rook
Better than a Duster I have read through the magazine and gradually have come to the conclusion that all you are interested in is how fast it goes, how long it takes to 62mph, it must be so-called premium, it must
cost a lot of money. I think you’re unfair about the MG ZS in GBU. I have the auto version with the weedy 999cc turbo petrol engine – sure, it’s no sports car, but where can you do high speeds anyway? The build quality is okay – much better than the Dacia Duster I had before. It’s quiet , comfortable and I have done 8000 pleasant miles. The main thing is it cost me £18,000 for a top-of-the-range auto.
I have loved cars since the early ’60s and my other car is an MG TF. I don’t think you have been fair to new MG. Roger Wickins
Bad taste
Am I the only person who cringed at the sheer awfulness of ‘resists roll like Piers Morgan in a branch of Greggs’ (Toyota Supra 300-mile drive, July)?
Seriously, not even so bad it’s funny, just bad. Great magazine otherwise. Piers Tarleton
Misunderstood
As an owner of a Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross front-wheel-drive manual that I purchased new a year ago, I must praise Steve Moody for his long-term review pieces about the Eclipse Cross. Very many motoring journalists have written a load of pony about this superb vehicle.
Speaking as a retired motor engineer, your reports seem honest, fair and true, whereas the others talk about a lack of performance and handling that’s not sporty enough. It’s an SUV, not a sports car. Obviously.
Mine handles fine on Norfolk’s rural roads and dual carriageways. I had wanted four-wheel drive, but to get that you need to have a CVT, but I simply don’t like or trust them, so I purchased the front-drive manual and had Michelin CrossClimate tyres fitted – which I suspect is a better combination than a 4x4 with the Yokohama summer tyres that Mitsubishi laughably supplies as standard.
Paul Christofis Apostoli
Whose fault?
As a reader of CAR for over 30 years I despair that part of Gavin Green’s solution to making cars safer (July column) is to make the driving test tougher. The current first-time pass rate for the driving test is only 21 per cent and the overall pass rate published at my local centre is 47 per cent.
Only the best and safest are passing. If you made the test even harder and the pass rate fell further, learners would not be prepared to pay for even more lessons so would give up or drive without a licence.
nd
CAR must also take a long hard look at itself. If young drivers want a fine-handling car they’ll read your articles and choose a Fiesta with its fabulously playful chassis, or a Mini with its go-kart handling, rather than something newer and cheaper. The problem is this playful Fiesta might be 10 years old and wear part-worn tyres.
Many of the dangerous situations are caused by more experienced drivers driving badly. What you’ve got to work out is how you’re going to educate the rest of us.
Mike Chandler
How about a Jenson Button?
I have decided my next car requires a Räikkönen button to switch off all the assist systems and let me do it all myself. Colin Molyneux
What’s so smart about a £2m EV?
That most innovative of British car makers has started a new era with a £2 million hypercar (Lotus Evija preview, August 2019 issue). 2000bhp. How magnificently pointless.
A car that is too fast for practical road use, and too wide for that matter. A toy for the few, an irrelevance to me and doubtless almost everyone else who has owned, or would like to own, a Lotus.
Please make something actually useful. I don’t want you to just update the Elise; feel free to do something totally fresh. I am fine with an EV but why not do something different and eschew the crazy numbers for a car that uses EV qualities to excite at normal levels of performance and speed? Surely Lotus of all companies knows that the pleasure of driving is about sensations not statistics.
Here’s hoping this is just a taster, and what comes after is worth the wait. Bruce Woodhouse
Should’ve been a £2m EV
Gordon Murray’s ‘flair for original engineering’ has deserted him with the T50 which, like the F1, is a 20th century car (Future Scoop, August). He’s even dragged the fan off his Brabham from the ’70s. What’s original about it? Carbon? No. Internal combustion engine? Hardly.
It should have been a high-tech electric hypercar to blow the F1 into history, but instead it’s like the sad album-too-far from an ageing pop star. Steve Holcroft
Extinction looms
I may have had too much time on my hands waiting for an MoT, but in the whole of your August issue, there are only five pictures of saloon cars, and ⊲